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As Helena Vimes clocked into her shift in the Bos primary engine room, an outsider would be forgiven to not assume that the short, quiet Marrow female was the Chief Engineer of this vessel. Only the designation code on her uniform offered any hint to her identity. Unlike other Sol imperial spacecraft, Helena was not the type of Chief Engineer to bark orders at those under her command, to knock aside other engineers unable to properly fix the problem or scrutinize ever layer of maintaining the working diagnostics and vital systems of the vessel. Indeed, while Helena was appropriately the head of the chain of command in the engineering staff, she gave the rest of the engineers plenty of agency to handle maintenance and low-level issues. Operations on the whole and major concerns where addressed to her as Chief Engineer, who was skilled with the engineering of difficult infrastructure from the subnautic Marrow homeworld.
Mind you, aquatic pressures vs impending the vacuum of space were contrasting engineering challenges in terms of rigors and stresses. Helena had been promoted to Chief Engineer for her keen analytic mind, means of testing unorthodox solutions to advance innovations, and that Marrows on the whole as a species could adapt to nearly any planetary or space-based environment that had its own aqua biomes or the materials to synthesize water. Hydrogen and Oxygen were neigh universal elements, depending on the compounds to extract them from, and then it was merely a question of additive compounds, minerals and nutrients that could sustain Marrow further with their bathing needs if scheduled for service in dry atmospheres.
And Helena enjoyed an optimal ionized aqua pod for her sleep before approaching the daily routines of keeping the ScaNi Z-LLeen, Class IV Cruiser, Type Πdesignated "Bos" space worthy for the well being of the crew and their missions. The Bos had an ellipsoid hull with aerodynamic wings, detachable cargo containers, forcefields, Delta class weapons, 40 shuttle pods that also doubled as escape craft, three proton hyperdrive engines and a fleet of scanning reconnaissance drones. To forgive the engineering parlance, Helena's favorite features of the Bos was its quark-splitting reactor and hydraulic-grav interior mechanisms from which most of the other ship's systems were based.
Enjoying a nutrient wafer (now claiming "Pagnarlya & Mint" flavor!) Helena stood at the bottom of an access ladder surrounding the interior of the engine room hull, observing some of the lesser engineers at work. Helena was considered svelte for a Marrow in her Sol engineering orange-white, with blue trim uniform, although she would be considered more than chunky by human physiology. That was due to her 'legs' actually being the Marrow tail, which could split to ambulatory appendages for land travel. Powerful muscles kept her aquamarine scaled tail powerfully built for the dual evolutionary purposes of locomotion across two biomes. Had she been naked, one would be able to note the coverage of such scales from her long, flipper 'toes' to rear, and a few scattered across the back of her arms, shoulders and base of the head supporting her feathery, green-blue hair and vestigial fins. Such fins were mainly ornamental on Marrow today.
"Staus report: Normal, F. Vimes," said J'Hrd, her Teluxciclain Deputy Chief Engineer. Being of the non-gendered, Teluxciclain race J'Hrd was a lanky assembly of noodle appendages, with a slim neck and vertically stacked eyes on dull, leathery skin. Having multifaceted tentacle like appendages was a boon for repair work.
"Good," Helena replied, "It's nice to know operating systems are stable ever since Lovely's awakening." The Lifeform Vitals Executor OS, serial #031775 now known as Lovely, had been brought to consciousness, for lack of a better term, as the Bos had navigated a cosmic ray storm as part of the systems had formed a rudimentary android body for Lovely before upgrades and her induction into the Bos crew.
However, the gaps in the ship's computers left from Lovely's awakening had lead to many glitches and eras in the operating program. While Lovely could still interface with the ship's computer to serve her original function, the Bos had nearly been decommissioned from the errors and headaches wrought from vitals until a preparatory LVE.OS software could be installed. As J'Hrd continued to brief Helena, she was happy to hear that the daily glitch tally was now below 55, a sign that they had nearly worked every quirk out of the system.
Well, mostly, as both Helena and J'Hrd were both hailed with an error alert on their personal communicators.
"I believe that punctuates ironic timing on my brief, Chief," J'Hrd said.
"Not an issue, J'Hrd," Helena, her large dark eyes filled with dour mirth as to the typical life of a spaceship engineer. "If there wasn't something that needed fixing I suppose I would get bored."
Although the issue at first appeared normal, Helena never expected at the time that it would lead to considerable changes aboard the Bos. Potentially weighty changes.
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